Dart’s brief letter after arriving home shows he’s on the same page as Dot. “I guess we both found out that the words do come pretty hard. After being with you for two days I love you much more than before and hope that we can be together for days and months and years on end in the future.” Apparently their mutual shyness did nothing to douse the flames.

In other news, he appreciates the food she packed for his trip. He was happy to have found a clean, comfy, air conditioned car for the long trip to Ohio. He is touched by her sweet gesture of calling his folks when he left NYC.

He writes of being lonely for her, of imagining her head on his shoulder in the rail car. He fondly recalls how wonderful her family is. And he thanks Dot for “being.”

Dot begins her Independence Day letter by avowing her alligience to Dart. She recalls that 27 hours ago, she kissed him good-bye on the train platform and watched him disappear into the crowd. Ever since then, she has been cursing herself for all the things she didn’t say.

“You’ve made me the happiest girl in the world, Dart and I pray that someday I’ll be able to prove it to you,” she writes. “Regardless of what happens between now and the time I again have the opportunity to tell you in person, remember I love you more than anything or anyone else and nothing can change that, ever.”

I think it’s safe to say this relationship has not only survived, but deepened.

Dart writes his first letter of the day in the pre-dawn hours. When his relatives left town, he and Burke decided to tour Cleveland at night.

They explored the Flats and all the industrial sights Dart has written about so eloquently in earlier letters. They saw all the traffic exiting downtown after the “Festival of Freedom” fireworks and continued until they came to a late-night Big Boy restaurant called Manners. When they stopped to get a bite to eat, they ran into none other than Dart’s friend Fred, two other guys from school, and their three dates. All night long, Burke and Dart ran into friends who were out experiencing life after dark.

Five of Dart’s friends are home on leave, and they all depart on the same train Thursday night. They made plans to “do the town” the night before returning to their various branches of the military.

Dart got philosophical about the happy accidents of running into so many old friends. “Things like this really make me sure that our lives are planned for us. So many chance meetings and unusual happenings wouldn’t, couldn’t come true if we were not being guided by some Divine Hand.”

After enumerating several instances that seemed too perfect to be coincidental, he continues, “It must have been planned for us to be happy and so deeply in love, Dot. If it’s possible to love a person with every ounce of energy one has, and then to increase that love by leaps and bounds in but 35 short hours, then that’s the case now. I live for the day when I can use that New Haven timetable again, when we can be together next, and so much in love.”

He expressed the frustration of being with a person he is so incredibly fond of and finding it hard to speak his feelings. He recalls Sunday afternoon when he kissed her in the car and told her he loved her. He says it was one of the biggest moments of his life. He has relived every fleeting instant of his visit countless times, with countless more to come.

Next, we find a letter written at the other end of this same day, the last one he will write from home for a very long time.

He visited Case this morning and saw everyone except the two people he most wanted to see. He was unable to thank Rousch for his role in getting Dot and Dart together. And he missed seeing the professor of his survey class from whom Dart had hoped to get a map to take with him.

Dart and the boys, each in a different uniform, gathered at Fred’s house where they spent a couple of hours listening to symphonic records. After lunch downtown, they returned to Dart’s house on the pretext of seeing his mother, but really to see Dot’s photograph. Fred commented that now he understood why Dart left town on his short leave. “But,” said Dart, “Fred doesn’t know the half of it. I like you for ‘you’ and not just your looks. Of course, if a much desired and cherished gift is in an attractive or beautiful package, it’s value in desirability is greatly increased.”

Dart closes the letter by saying this was the best leave a guy could hope for; a fine family, two days with the girl of the rest of his life, and a day with old buddies.

And finally, it’s Dot’s turn to get a word in. With typical good humor, Dot relates the difficulty of getting back to work today. “…I can’t remember ever having to put forth such an effort to stir from a horizontal position. Be that as it may, and in spite of great odds, I managed to get here and punch the time clock 5 minutes before the zero hour. …the only thing that has kept me awake.. is the constant telling and re-telling of what we did Sunday and Monday and how much fun I had.”

She writes how sad she is to know there will be no letter from Dart waiting for her on the hall table today, but she promises to forgive him if it happens again for the same reason. “Aren’t I awful?,” she asks. “The saying is ‘give ’em an inch and they’ll want a mile,’ but in my case, it’s ‘Give me two days and I’ll want you forever.'”

She spent a few lines remembering where they were just two days ago and then decided she’d be better off if she stopped living in the past and started living for the future.

Her cousins Jane and Betty brought over some homemade blueberry muffins and then convinced Dot to join them at the movies. They saw Gary Cooper in “The Story of Dr. Wassel.” Dot loved the picture because it was Navy, through and through, and because it is the first war film she has seen in a long time where both the hero and the heroine were alive at the end of the film.

As I read these months of letters, I’m often struck by the similar themes and thoughts expressed by the two authors on the same day. Neither has had a chance to read the other’s letter yet, but they seem to be on the same wave length so often. It must be love.

We have two short letters from Dot today.

In one, she encloses the snapshots taken during Dart’s visit. How I wish I had those pictures now! She mentions the one where El tried to pose the kids in a passionate kiss. It seems her mother was looking through all the photos and asked a few subtle questions about that one in particular. Dot tried to sidestep the questions, but Ruth persisted. Finally, Dot explained that she was whispering something to Dart at the exact moment that El snapped the shutter. Said Ruth, “Golly, if that’s the way you whisper to him, I’d like to see you kiss him!” Wrote Dot, “She’s not so dumb.” Say I, “No one ever accused Ruth Chamberlain of being dumb!”

Dot writes that she’s glad he enjoyed his trip because that may persuade him to visit again. Then she wishes him all the best when he returns to Great Lakes. She hopes he’s sent where he wants to go for his training, and she hopes there’s someone there he knows from home so he won’t get so homesick.

In the second letter of the day, Dot encloses a cartoon which has been lost in the intervening years. It had something to do with a man and a beard.

Her mother’s lingering malady has been diagnosed as tonsillitis, requiring the removal of the offending things next week.

In the final paragraph, Dot writes, “Oh Dart, I love you so much that I tried to make iced tea out of cold coffee. And after I had the vile stuff made, I sweetened it with salt.” She’s got it bad.

Here are just a few quick lines at the end of Dart’s first liberty in eight months. He spent some time at the U.S.O. before exploring the city on his own and learned two things: Milwaukee is quite a bit bigger than he had expected it to be, and a train yard and engine are not proper places for a white uniform. (No longer so white.)

He’ll have a medical exam in a few minutes and then he’s off to an unknown destination tomorrow. He hopes he’ll be somewhere on the East coast so he and Dot can see each other more often. “Until I can write again remember that wherever I go, my heart and my memories are with you.”

Dot writes a page of introduction to a poem she wrote to try to explain how she feels about Dart. She writes, “It’s corny and juvenile and everything else poetry shouldn’t be, but I’m sending it along anyway just to show you how I spend my time.” She recalls that a week ago at this time, they were sitting in the car by “their” island. How she wishes she could have said the words then.

The second page is the poem itself. Later in her life, Dot would become well known for the witty, clever ditties should could write for any and all occasions. This work is neither clever or witty, but it speaks volumes about the depth of her feelings for her sailor.

An excerpt:

You’ve given your love, which is more to me

Than all that has been or is to be.

You’ve awakened my heart to that which is good

And have done more for me than I thought anyone could.

Dart’s short letter brings a bitter pill. He has his orders; he’s going to San Francisco for his advanced training. There is a fire control school in Connecticut, but he will be thousands of miles away. He says he’s always wanted to travel and see the world, but now all he wants to do is spend time with Dot.

He writes that his destination makes him even happier that he was able to see Dot on his leave. “I have you to work for and fight for. Work and fight harder than ever before.”

He expresses his concern about how he’ll get through the next couple of weeks with no letters from Dot or from his family. He’s already terribly homesick and misses mail after only a few days.

There is a poignancy in his final paragraph that expresses hope, but also an underlying fear and uncertainty. “Bu the time you get this I will be far away, but be a brave girl and don’t cry. It’s not so long before we can be together again. I don’t know when, but it can’t be another six or eight months. When the war is over, if we still feel the same way, we can be together forever.”

Dot has made it through the first half of a hot, tiring, busy two-day sale with the aid of two letters from her “one and only” that she read over her lunch break.

She’s pleased he had a comfortable return trip to Great Lakes. She’ll be happy to tell Cynthia that Dart’s cousin Marg remembers her after all. She’s interested to learn that Burke and Edith are going steady and says she hopes Burke has better taste in girls than his brother does. Then she adds that she’s grateful Dart’s taste is so bad or she would be out of luck. (Is there a hyphen in “self-esteem issues”?)

She claims that it’s so humid in Greenwich that when her kid brother Doug walked into the kitchen after falling into a river, their mother didn’t notice any difference between his appearance and that of everyone else’s!

She’s happy to hear he’s on his way to advanced training and says she go nuts until she learns where he’ll be stationed. She wants him as close as possible, but her first hope is that he goes where he most wants to be.

She asks if he enjoyed his Milwaukee liberty and if he met any cute “number” she should be jealous about. “I get jealous very easily, you know. Now, if I were smart, I wouldn’t have told you that, but I’m not smart, so I did.”

I find that previous statement very interesting. It belies the strength of the woman who would become my mother. When I was a teenager, I remember Mom telling me that there was no place for jealousy in real love. If you were sure of your love and that of your partner, why would you waste energy on jealousy? Conversely, if you were jealous, it spoke volumes about the feebleness of the love between you. I always liked the self-assuredness of that statement, and recognized its truth even as a young girl.

Dart’s first letter of the day is written from Omaha Station, aboard a handsome Pullman car. All 25 men from his unit are in the car, as well as two petty officers. “The Navy’s doing pretty well by us, too. Only one man to a berth and no space left over.”

He writes that there are guards posted at either end of the car and the men are not supposed to talk to anyone on the outside. I guess it’s some kind of secret that the Navy is sending 25 guys to fire control school on Treasure Island. Dart’s biggest concern is finding someone who can mail this letter.

Later that Day, Dart writes that they are passing the 500th milepost since he last wrote. They are approaching Cheyenne, Wyoming and the sun is approaching the western horizon.

He takes a couple of paragraphs to describe the sights from his window: rugged, grayish shadows against the yellow and blue sky are the first glimpse they’ve had of the Rockies, which they’ll cross as they sleep. They are traveling through a wide, flat valley, populated by horses and cows. Occasionally he sees the glint of sunlight bouncing off a farm house window in the distance.

That’s all for today.

Dot’s letter begins with the report that her “second best beau’s wife” just called her to babysit on Tuesday. Of course she means the Pecsoks. They are sorry they didn’t meet Dart on his quick trip to Greenwich. They would have liked to meet a fellow Clevelander.

Dot is thrilled with the quality of the enlargement she had made of Dart’s snapshot. She proclaims him the best looking “gob” she’s ever seen, and then decides to remove the limitation of “gob.” Best looking man ever!

The sale at work is over, and Dot’s only regret is that with all the running around she did, she didn’t lose a single ounce. She pronounces herself “something short of a ten ton truck.” She says there’s nothing wrong with being healthy, but she thinks she’s overdoing it!

She reports that her mother is feeling well enough to take a trip to Lake Sunapee with Doug nest week. It looks like she won’t have her tonsils out just yet, after all.

Dot plans to spend her half day off at the beach, working on a little tan. She knows she won’t have as much fun as she did on her last beach trip, when Dart was there.

Dart’s offering today is another of his extraordinarily descriptive letters. He paints a vivid word picture of the rugged scenery he can see from the train window. They have crossed through Utah and Nevada since sunrise. Dart is enchanted by some of what he sees, but he loathes other bits. “I’m writing this from somewhere in Nevada. Where in Nevada doesn’t matter worth a row of pins. I wouldn’t give you thirty cents for the whole huge state, with its endlessly rolling wastelands, millions of scrubby evergreens, and untold myriads of sagebrush bushes.”

But then he proceeds to write with reverence about the splendor of the distant purple mountains and the dazzling colors reflected in them.

He describes a typical desert town with its gray, weathered buildings, sparse population, and a smattering of horses and decrepit cars. He says the majority of businesses are either saloons, two-bit hotels or houses of ill-repute, in mute testimony to Nevada’s “wild and wicked character.”

He was thrilled to be able to experience first-hand an engineering marvel he’s read about for years – the Lucin Cutoff. This is a series of bridges and fills that cross the Great Salt Lake. He was impressed by the vast salt flats surrounding the lake, looking for all the world as though a heavy snow storm had just passed through the area. He describes the sparkling beauty of the lake itself and the ring of mountain peaks reflected in its calm waters.

To rely solely on my paraphrasing of this letter is to cheat yourself of Dart’s gift for relating the natural wonders he witnessed on this trip. This is one letter that’s worth the effort of reading the images of the original pages.

He ends the letter with a paragraph of such longing that I’m sure Dot could feel it as she held the pages in her hand. “When I’m with you, I’m enchanted into a sort of silence, and when I’m far away, I long for you to be here (or me there).  It doesn’t seem possible that we’re so far apart. My love deepens with the distance, Dearest.”

It’s a good thing, because there will come a time when the distance between them is even greater than it is now.

Dot’s letter is short, but very sweet. She’s sad to learn he’s being sent so far away, but she feels they have both been so lucky that she chooses to focus on her gratitude instead of her disappointment. “If I weren’t sure of the way I felt about you, I s’pose I’d feel differently about it. But I am sure, and 3000 miles or 3000 years won’t make me change my mind.” It’s lovely to see her  as adamant as Dart about the permanence of their relationship.

She adds, “When I look at the map, California seems very far away, and I get a big lump in my throat, but you’re still in the country and I thank God for that.”

She cautions him not to write to her when he should be studying because she doesn’t wan to interfere with anything that might delay his coming home.